An enchanting vision of our world brought to light through the eyes of four women, Metro Lands is a book crossing the metro of Paris and the suburban railway of Mumbai to offer us poetry of small things.

This book examines the gigantic, omnipresent arterial system that transforms each city into a living, breathing creature : the connective tissue knitting disparate organs – glamorous, plebeian, historic, modern, functional, touristic – into a body with soul.

The suburban railways is a shared space that transcends clichés about both cities, when a crowd of millions of individuals parts to reveal fragments of stories we can only guess at, or invent.

Written by poets Karthika Naïr and Sampurna Chattarji, and illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet (in residency in Mumbai) and Roshni Vyam (in residency in Paris), Metro Lands celebrates the multiplicity of gazes on the familiar, the everyday — through word and image, language and shape and colour.

Until the Lions : Echoes from the Mahabharata (HarperCollins India/Arc Publications UK, 2015), her reimagining of the Mahabharata in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live ! Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the 2016 Atta Galatta Prize for Fiction.

Joëlle Jolivet was born in 1965, and as far as she can remember, has always been drawing, painting or engraving… After graphic arts’ and lithography’s studies, Joëlle found her favorite tool of expression in linocut. She illustrated numerous children’s picture books, book covers and novels, and also works regularly for the press. Her books are published throughout the world. She published in India The Honey Hunter (Zubaan Books) and An Indian Beach : By Day and Night (Tara Books).